Orchestra conductors must exercise a unique style of leadership.  They must listen intently, and without saying a word, draw out strong performances from their orchestras.  This requires that they learn to be the ultimate collaborators,  understand the unique capabilities of each musician and decide how best to blend them into a coherent whole.

In this video, Itay Talgam shows that contrary to their popular image, the best conductors are not dictators.  Instead, they are successful by being great teachers and by mastering the art of helping others give voice to expressive contributions.  The most successful conductors believe in the inherent capacity of the people they lead to accomplish whatever is required.  The players may need to be coaxed, nudged and enticed, but masterful performances reside within them.

Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic and author of The Art of Possibility, suggests that one way to determine whether you are on track is to look into the eyes of those you lead.  “The eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren’t shining, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing that’s keeping my musicians’ eyes from shining?’”

Conductors, or leaders, who recognize that they do not need to make a sound or dominate or control, can focus on enabling others to be more effective.  They can help others feel energetic, lively, engaged and focused not only on the task at hand, but more importantly, connected and listening to the other musicians, their orchestral collaborators, required to make beautiful music.

Are we really surprised?

Companies have been obsessed with pay for performance for almost two decades.  And like any obsession, it has clouded the judgment of executives and others, such as human resources professionals and consultants, who should know better.

The problem is that pay for performance is founded on a two faulty beliefs:

1. If you reward something you get more of the behavior you want.
2. If you punish something you get less of the behavior you don’t want.

Unfortunately for our misguided execs, study after study has demonstrated results that massively contradict this way of thinking.  It’s hard to fault them entirely.  Logically, one would think that incentives work.  The science, however, has proven otherwise and has found:

1. As long as the job involves only mechanical skills or rules-based tasks, incentives work as expected.  The higher the incentive, the better the performance.
2. But once the job calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill—some conceptual and/or creative thinking—a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

These results have been replicated over and over again by psychologists, sociologists, and economists . . . including those funded by that left-wing, socialist institution, the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Even a recent study from McKinsey found that three noncash motivators—praise from immediate supervisors, attention from leaders, and a chance to direct projects—are at least as effective as the three most highly rated monetary ones.

Now, don’t misunderstand me.  Money is a motivator.  If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated to do the job.

Once you pay people enough, however, it is no longer a factor in motivating performance, especially in jobs that require basic cognitive, conceptual and creative skill . . . the majority of jobs in the U.S. economy.

Organizations must stop drinking the pay for performance Kool-Aid.  Pay for performance, carrot and stick management, performance appraisal, time clocks, verbal and written warnings, and many other management and HR practices are outdated and just don’t work.

Instead, it’s time to equip managers with the tools to manage in the modern workplace and support them with HR programs and practices that encourage the right behavior.  That’s about redefining what it is to manage and it’s about completely overhauling HR.  More importantly, it’s founded on the notion that we stop treating people like cogs in a machine and start treating them like smart, creative, self-motivated people who want to at all times do their best.

That’s not just some feel good manifesto.  It’s the fact-based, scientific reality required to be a high performing organization.

“This integrated talent management solution ushers in a new era for our company that’s about improving how we think about and manage talent.  These new tools will enhance our ability to identify the talent our business needs to grow and to be successful.  Acquiring, rewarding and retaining high performers are the keys to our success as a company.”

It’s hard to disagree with the above statement (except for the notion that technology will solve the problem!).  It boldly reaffirms the old homily:  People are our greatest asset.

But that’s just the point.  It’s unimaginative, overused, and as a result, rarely perceived as sincere.  And in the case of most companies, especially in the era of constant “restructuring” (see The Trouble with Layoffs), it rarely is sincere.

If you think I’m being tough, just listen to some of the quotes from employees and managers working for companies pushing the talent mind-set:

• Across the organization, I’m not sure we do a good job of hiring.  We seem to be more impressed with credentials than capability.  What I mean is it’s more important for you to have gone to an Ivy, than to actually be able to do the job.
• Performance management is a once a year process that managers and employees dread.
• Performance appraisal is not really about performance.  It’s about adjusting ratings to fit the merit budget.
• We believe in pay for performance.  High performers get significantly greater merit increases and performance bonuses.  But beyond sales, I’m not sure we measure performance well.
• We are very proud of our succession planning process . . . but we have never promoted anyone as a result of the effort.  The information isn’t used.
• We do not actively manage the development of our employees, even high potentials (Note:  the engagement survey data confirmed this).

The obsession with talent is a sign that executives aren’t leading.  They are failing to appreciate and nurture the potential of their existing employees.

Like love-struck teenagers, these executives are unpredictable, reactive and focused desperately on short-term gratification.  They are always on the lookout for the perfect resume, the “star,” the romance of the moment.  They seek the dream employee who is so smart that no training, motivation, supervision or coaching will be required.

Much of this obsession is based on the faulty assumption that top performance depends primarily on talent—innate, genetically-based qualities.  There is considerable evidence that hard work and intrinsic motivation—which can be supported or undermined by the social environment—also play central roles.

For example, researchers studying the impact of learning environments on cognitive skills have discovered that students who over an extended period of time are treated as if they are intelligent actually become so.  If they are taught demanding content, and are expected to explain and find connections as well as memorize and repeat, they learn more and learn more quickly. They think of themselves as learners. They are able to bounce back in the face of short-term failures.

These results are giving rise to the new idea of intelligence-in-practice:  Intelligence is the habit of persistently trying to understand things and make them function better.  Intelligence is working to figure things out, varying strategies until a workable solution is found.  Intelligence is knowing what one does, and doesn’t, know, seeking information and organizing that information so that it makes sense and can be remembered.  In short, one’s intelligence is the sum of one’s habits of mind.

Maybe in the case of executives currently obsessed with finding unicorns, intelligence is knowing that such potential is already hard at work in their own organization.  Intelligence is knowing when you lead them, they will perform.

A marketing exec friend of mine gave me a call yesterday to catch up.   After swapping stories about families and our current work, he finally asked after years of knowing me, “What exactly is change management anyway?”

I had to think for a moment before answering him for a couple of reasons.  First, because he’s miles away from IT, HR, PMO’s and the project world, and I didn’t want to lose him to jargon.  And second, ever since launching Solleva Group mid last year, I have played with a number of pithy elevator statements designed to answer that succinctly, powerfully, and in a manner that would immediately resonate with potential clients.

In these situations, I generally apply the Mother In-Law Rule.  If my mother in-law understands my explanation, then I probably have it right.  I’m not questioning my mother in-law’s intelligence.  She’s a sharp cookie.  But her native language is Italian and she hasn’t worked professionally since the 1950’s.  In her world, if you want someone to change, feed them well and they’ll do anything you want . . . there’s something to that!

So, I answered my friend saying, “Change management is the process of helping organizations plan for, implement and manage the human side of projects like technology and outsourcing implementations, merger integrations, or restructurings. We help make sure that people get excited about the change and don’t create problems that cause missed deadlines, budget overruns or poorly used new capability.”

“How do you do that?  What do you do?” he asked.

I thought about taking him through an example and explaining things like as is/to be analysis, business requirements documentation, readiness assessment, stakeholder analysis, communications planning and execution, training and knowledge transfer.  I thought about explaining the difference between technical challenges and adaptive challenges, and the approach for solving adaptive challenges.  I also thought about talking about urgency, organization alignment, resistance, and vision.

Instead, I applied the Mother In-Law Rule and said . . . “I listen.”

I listen to make sure we understand the needs and concerns of those who are receiving and those who are implementing the change.  I listen to understand executives and project sponsors.  And I listen to understand the culture and values of the organization.

Then, with that understanding, I use a variety of tools to make sure all of these groups help to make the new thing successful.

By listening to the organization, we begin to see through the eyes of those that will experience the change.  We empathize.  And that give us the ability to know how to engage others by linking the change to what’s important to them.

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “It’s a lot like marketing.”

Exactly.

“We need to discuss your performance.”

There are few phrases that cast more fear in the hearts of employees.

I was talking with a client last week about managing change for their implementation of performance management technology.   After a quick technical chat about scope, the vendor, the timetable, resources and current tools and process, I asked the obvious question, “What are the larger objectives you are hoping to achieve with this implementation?”

I expected her to say something about improving process efficiency or ease of data entry or access to data.  I also wouldn’t have been surprised if she had said that her HR function wanted to increase the number of managers completing appraisals on time.

Instead, she said, “Our CEO wants to create a high performance culture and we think that a better performance appraisal process and the right tool to deliver it will get us there.”  Their new and “improved” system included a 10-point scale (up from 5), a new universal competency model and the addition of an evaluation for how employees exhibited company values.

Pretty snazzy, but . . .

This is the moment where I take a deep breath and remind myself that being a change management consultant often requires detached responsibility*.

It’s amazing to me that 45 years after the Harvard Business Review published “Split Roles in Performance Appraisal” (Myer, Kay, & French), we still believe performance appraisal works.  The study, conducted at GE, found that the company’s performance management system not only didn’t work, it produced results that were the opposite of what was intended.  The researchers found:

• Criticism has a negative effect on achievement of goals
• Praise has little effect one way or the other
• Performance improves most when specific goals are established
• Defensiveness resulting from critical appraisal produces inferior performance
• Coaching should be a day-to-day, not a once-a-year, activity
• Mutual goal setting, not criticism, improves performance
• Participation by the employee in the goal-setting procedure helps produce favorable results
• Performance appraisal “interviews” should not be conducted with salary or promotion in the balance.

Countless other scientific studies conclude the same thing.  And more powerfully, research conducted with brain scanning technologies such as SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) have shown us these result are directly connected to the way the brain works.

Yet, we still insist on conventional approaches to performance appraisal.  The technology and evaluation frameworks may provide more sophisticated window dressing, but the underlying process remains flawed and the results are questionable.

So, what works?  What generates higher performance?

Two things.

First, intrinsic motivation.  High performance comes when people love what they do.  Some of the most dedicated employees on the planet work for free.  They are called volunteers.  And they work countless hours for organizations that give them a sense of purpose.  They don’t care if they get raises, bonuses or even praise.  They volunteer because their work has meaning to them and because they feel like they are making a contribution.

We all know people who approach their day jobs with the same passion.  They are engaged, plugged in and having fun.  There’s no need to manage their performance.  They are too busy managing it themselves.

Second, goals.  High performance also is achieved with goals.  These aren’t the goals that are set once per year and forgotten about until it’s time for the annual review.  These are goals that are set, reviewed and tweaked every day.  Myer and company called this WP&R, or Work Planning and Review.  WP&R discussions between an employee and manager are an ongoing process built on a foundation of collaborative problem solving.  No judgment.  No rating scale.  Just the continuous process of improving.

That’s what passionate people living their purpose do.  They strive to be better.

Amazing, isn’t it?  Getting high performance from employees is not about some Frederick Tayloresque command and control system of alpha dominance.  It is about engaging employees and tapping passions.  It’s not about incenting behavior with rewards and punishments or demanding compliance to some generic norm.  It is about collaboration.

High performance happens when you gather people who enjoy what they do and who have fun figuring out how they can do it better together.

My suggestion is that we set aside the folly of formal appraisal as well as any notion of a manager being able to improve performance.  Instead, let’s focus on making sure our managers know how to listen to employees, understand and sometimes draw out their passions, and create collaborative cultures working toward a purpose greater than next quarter’s earnings.

• Detached responsibility—the ability to educate, resolve conflict, or manage change by taking responsibility for what is within our control and letting go of the need to resolve issues out of our range of immediate and direct influence.  For more on detached responsibility and the other Principles of Interaction read, Listening to Conflict:  Finding Constructive Solutions to Workplace Disputes.